In the Beaumont Hamel British Cemetery lies Pte. W. S. Lonsdale of the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was nineteen and from Salford, and his parents inscribed his tombstone: ‘Our Loss, his eternal gain.’ Close to him is Pte. F. A.W. Tagg, aged nineteen, a soldier of the Middlesex Regiment from Ealing: ‘His memory is as dear today as in the hour he passed away.’ Nearby is Pte. Frank Halliwell of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who was from Chorley and twenty years old when he died. ‘He answered his country’s call’, wrote his family.

To the south of the 29th Division was the 36th (Ulster) Division, which managed, partly because they ran at the German trenches rather than walking, to break into the Schwaben Redoubt under the cover of smoke shells fired by trench mortars, having also crawled out into no man’s land before Zero Hour. As early as 7.15 a.m., under cover of extraordinarily heavy fire—which the Germans described as the worst in the sector and which featured Stokes mortars and some 9-in. mortars firing 200 lb bombs lent by the French—the leading battalions of the 109th and 108th Brigades crept forward to within a hundred yards of the German front trenches. Recent battlefield archaeology shows that they dug into no man’s land before the attack and therefore were so close to the enemy that they won the all-important race to the parapet. When the buglers in the front trench signaled ‘Advance’, the Official History records, ‘the scene with the mist clearing off and the morning sun glistening on the long rows of bayonets was brilliant and striking’.23 Back then, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne was celebrated on 1 July under the Old Style calendar, rather than on the 12th as it is today, and the Protestants among the Ulstermen believed the anniversary was a good augury.*1